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Monthly Archives: June 2019

Tomorrow is the first of two Democratic Presidential candidate debates. With so many candidates running, even splitting the debate over two nights still seems like it’s going to be too crowded a debate stage.

As a consequence, there is likely to be nothing much of interest said in this first debate(s). How many actual chances to speak will each candidate get? One or Two? So we might, if we’re lucky, get a few sentences out of each candidate. That’s a shame because some of these candidates are interesting, and I would be curious to hear some give and take with candidates like Andrew Yang or Tulsi Gabbard; two candidates who are unlikely to get more than the minimum amount of airtime.

So at this point, the real story (at least to me) won’t be what the candidates say, but how the coverage of the debate is handled by the MSM. The debate is being shown on NBC/MSNBC, which is well known for its own biases, so how they cover the candidates, and how the other TV media cover the candidates, will be more revealing than anything the candidates say. As a casual viewer of mainstream TV news, here are my guesses on the media’s picks for the Democratic candidate.

NBC/MSNBC: Although the network has shown love to all of the major candidates, the one they have come down to defending has been Joe Biden. The Morning Joe gang routinely sounds like a Biden cheering section. My guess is that NBC/MSNBC feels like Biden has the best shot to beat Trump, and have taken an editorial position to support Biden.

CNN: CNN doesn’t sound like it has any animus towards Biden, but hasn’t made up its mind and just wants the most leftward candidate who can beat Trump. So it seems for now they are actually being an honest broker other than mostly ignoring the candidates who are too far down in the polls to have a shot. They may have learned their lesson with Beto to not fall in love to early. The heartbreak is still probably painful from that.

ABC: This network has clearly taken the editorial position that Biden can’t beat Trump and his constant gaffes are not going away. That’s why they’re the only major TV news station (other than Fox) to cover extensively the Hunter Biden corruption scandal. ABC seems to want to clear the field of Biden quickly to allow a more electable candidate rise up. They just don’t know who that is yet.

CBS: This is the mystery to me. I honestly have not been able to get a firm handle on their positioning yet (maybe after I see their coverage of the debate) but I suspect it mirror’s CNN’s position.

Fox News: With nothing at stake and no frantic need to push the Democratic primaries on a mission to replace Trump, their coverage seems to be the most even handed. They’ve had several Town Halls with Democratic candidates (including a successful one by Bernie Sanders) and have had the candidates who will actually appear (most of the top tier candidates boycott Fox) as guests. I’ve seen Gabbard and Yang multiple times on different Fox shows.

I’m curious if we’ll know by the weekend if the MSM has settled on a candidate, or at least decided on a slate of possible candidates. Since none of the candidates will probably get to say much (with the exception of Biden; this is on NBC/MSNBC after all), the ones declared “winners” will be purely at the media networks discretion.

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

… Today, people like them who dare venture into this “There Be Dragons” territory on the intellectual map have met with outrage and derision — even, or perhaps especially, from people who pride themselves on openness.

In other words, today’s dangerous ““there Be Dragons” territory” was yesterday’s conventional wisdom. Of course for that very reason, the IDW isn’t any sort of intellectual movement; it’s simply a catch-all term for public intellectuals who found themselves on the wrong end of the SJW guillotine simply by not changing their entire worldview every time there is a new outrage trending on Twitter. The fact that they make such a tiny fraction of opinion makers is troubling though. An honest intelligentsia would almost always find itself on the wrong end of Twitter madness. I guess we don’t have one of those.

But on to Endgame and the answer to the question, is there a conservative manifesto buried in Avengers: Endgame?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Also No. I loved Avengers: Endgame, as I wrote about here, but the author’s contention, that the MCU version of time travel is more conservative than what he calls the “standard model,” seems like nonsense. The standard model is that when you time travel, you are going back to your actual past and can influence things in your past to change your present. This was amply demonstrated in Back to the Future among other films. Marty McFly’s changes in the past actually give him a better present. In the MCU however, Dr. Banner/Hulk calls this nonsense. You can’t change the past. What’s done is done. All you can do is go back and, by actually being in the past, create a new and distinct timeline, where your past changes will have no effect on your own past or history, only on the new timeline you’ve created.

As a theory of time travel, this actually makes more logical sense and is more up to date with Quantum Mechanics as nonscientists such as myself know it (to time travel, they go through the ‘Quantum Realm’) than the old version. But there is nothing particularly political about it. The fact that you can’t change the past in the MCU time travel version doesn’t mean you are trapped by consequences, since in one sense, that sort of time travel frees you from consequence. You can go back to the past, do anything you want, like kill your grandfather, and it won’t affect you, your history, or anything about your “present” since the consequences are borne by the alternate universe created by the time traveling. As a consequence, Tony Stark gets a heart to heart talk with his father in 1970, Thor gets a heart to heart talk with his mother in pre-Ragnarok Asgard, and Captain America gets into a brawl with his own 2012 self.

So instead of conservative manifesto, I see clickbait. You can do better Quillette. However I do acknowledge that the villain Thanos is a Paul Ehrlich-like enviro-nut. Frankly, Endgame was such a dense movie that they barely could fit a single “you go gurrls” scene in the film.

That’s not to say that liberal Hollywood doesn’t make unintentionally conservative films. They have to, because like it or not, they live in a world that mostly runs along conservative (small c) rules. Juno of course is a great example. Although screenwriter Diablo Cody seems horrified that the film as viewed seems to have a pro-life message, and has stated she regrets she wrote it in such a way, the truth is that’s what makes it a heartwarming film. There is no version of that movie in which Juno decides to go to the clinic to get rid of a clump of cells and everyone shares the same heartwarming ending. The movie just would not have become the hit it did or even have gotten made. If they could, Hollywood would make movies all day about women who exert their choice to abort their babies, but that doesn’t make a movie concept that sells.

During the 1970’s, when street crime was much more of a thing, and was a cause of real fear and anxiety among the general public, the Dirty Harry and Death Wish films were highly popular, because they represented a real fear of street crime among the public. Hollywood was just as liberal then as now, but they recognized the money making appeal of the average guy getting revenge on criminals, or a cop bending the rules to provide street justice when it wasn’t available through the system.

Red Dawn was a rare exception to the rule that cold war fears were to be exploited solely by the left. “Because…we live here” is probably the most right-wing thing said in American cinema. Try using that as an argument for immigration restriction in your college Social Issues class and see where that gets you.

Hollywood will continue to make movies that are outwardly lefty and lose money, and movies that really do have a conservative bias (like The Dark Knight Rises) which totally slips by the Hollywood censors, but I don’t think Endgame falls in either category. For that, you’ll have to wait for Marvel Studio’s Phase 5, The Intersectional Avengers.

So popular are super hero properties these days that they are actually making TV shows that don’t include any actual superheroes. The long running Gotham concluded its series run this spring by finally showing Batman in its series finale, after 5 seasons. Under development on the DC Universe streaming platform is Metropolis, a TV show set in Superman’s city without Superman. And getting ready for its second season premiere, once again without any Superman, is Krypton.

But even among a group of odd takes on super hero locales sans actual super heroes, Krypton is different. Taking place 200 years before the planet explodes the series revolves around the adventures of Superman’s grandfather, Seg-El. But rather than just being a Gotham-esque deep dive into DC history, the series has current Earth character Adam Strange (no relation to the Marvel sorcerer) somehow time traveling and space traveling to this pre-destruction era on Krypton. Strange has a mission to save the timeline and Superman in the “present” by keeping the destruction of Krypton on course.

As a premise, this is messed up. In the first season Strange and Seg-El team up, with Seg-El only half buying Strange’s story about being from another planet in the future, their team up is contingent on Seg-El not knowing that Strange is really rooting for Krypton’s destruction. But then how would Seg-El ever find that out? Enter General Zod (as in “kneel before…”- that guy), another time traveler, who most definitely wants to alter the planet’s fate. If Superman is never born in the process; so much the better.

So putting yourself in the place of an average Kryptonian, or just a person in general, which is the more moral position? To allow or cause for an entire planet to blow up, killing billions, to make sure one man (Superman) is born or to prevent an entire planet from blowing up, saving billions, even at the cost of one man (Superman)? The answer seems rather self-evident, placing the villain Zod as the guy with the moral high ground, while Earthman Adam, who just wants to save Superman, as someone trying to ensure genocide happens on schedule.

There are plenty of gaps in the basic premise big enough to drive the entire Fortress of Solitude through.

How did Adam, a scrappy kid from Detroit, get hooked up with the alien Sardath? Why would Sardath pick Adam, of all people, to go back in time? How did Sardath even know the timeline, and Superman, were in danger? What exactly was the cause of that danger (never explained)? Why did Adam assume that Kryptonians would care about Superman more than their own world’s destruction? How did Zod end up going back in time and why?

And for season two, with the timeline changed, Krypton saved, no Superman, and Brainiac conquering Earth, why would any Kryptonian help Adam reset the timeline ( in other words, destroying Krypton)? The entire series seems as if it went to production long before the basic premise was worked out with major gaps missing from the set up. It’s a tribute to the production that I actually found the show very watchable in spite of the gaps in the premise. Or, these guys are geniuses and all will be revealed, in a way that makes sense, over time.

Who knows? But I’m interested enough to stick around for another season and find out.